We had NVIDIA folks coming to our game studio, and they've said almost the same but for another set of applications - Basically if you want full support for Aut

We had NVIDIA folks coming to our game studio, and they've said almost the same but for another set of applications - Basically if you want full support for Autodesk or Adobe products (3DS Max, Maya, MotionBuilder, Photoshop) then you should get Quadra card. The Quadra has ECC, it's produced by NVIDIA itself (not 3rd party), and they have developed extensive driver support where each application that you run (Windows) would have specific settings that give you the best performace, quality or stability. There are tons of other manifacturers that produce NVIDIA cards, but they don't put ECC memory, boost the GPU frequency until they almost don't burn, etc. Also some specific features exist only for Quadra, that are not important for games - for example quick antialiased lines (just a simple example, there is more). So what MRB is saying is right. At the surface it looks Quadra/Tesla are worse, but their stability is much better, and customer support is guaranteed. NVIDIA can't simply support HW not built by them in large. It's not possible for them to know every kind of card there is.